Sustainable and cost-effective long-term storage remains an unsolved problem. The most widely used storage technologies today are magnetic (hard disk drives and tape). They use media that degrades over time and has a limited lifetime, which leads to inefficient, wasteful, and costly solutions for long-lived data. This article presents Silica: the first cloud storage system for archival data underpinned by quartz glass, an extremely resilient media that allows data to be left in situ indefinitely. The hardware and software of Silica have been co-designed and co-optimized from the media up to the service level with sustainability as a primary objective. The design follows a cloud-first, data-driven methodology underpinned by principles derived from analyzing the archival workload of a large public cloud service. Silica can support a wide range of archival storage workloads and ushers in a new era of sustainable, cost-effective storage.

Sustainable and cost-effective long-term storage remains an unsolved problem. The most widely used storage technologies today are magnetic (hard disk drives and tape). They use media that degrades over time and has a limited lifetime, which leads to inefficient, wasteful, and costly solutions for long-lived data. This paper presents Silica: the first cloud storage system for archival data underpinned by quartz glass, an extremely resilient media that allows data to be left in situ indefinitely. The hardware and software of Silica have been co-designed and co-optimized from the media up to the service level with sustainability as a primary objective. The design follows a cloud-first, data-driven methodology underpinned by principles derived from analyzing the archival workload of a large public cloud service. Silica can support a wide range of archival storage workloads and ushers in a new era of sustainable, cost-effective storage.

Structured illumination microscopy (SIM) reconstructs a super-resolved image from multiple raw images captured with different illumination patterns; hence, acquisition speed is limited, making it unsuitable for dynamic scenes. We propose a new method, Speckle Flow SIM, that uses static patterned illumination with moving samples and models the sample motion during data capture in order to reconstruct the dynamic scene with super-resolution. Speckle Flow SIM relies on sample motion to capture a sequence of raw images. The spatio-temporal relationship of the dynamic scene is modeled using a neural space-time model with coordinate-based multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs), and the motion dynamics and the super-resolved scene are jointly recovered. We validate Speckle Flow SIM for coherent imaging in simulation and build a simple, inexpensive experimental setup with off-the-shelf components. We demonstrate that Speckle Flow SIM can reconstruct a dynamic scene with deformable motion and 1.88 x the diffraction-limited resolution in experiment.